Asbestos: the public’s right to know

If only my mother had known about the deadly threat posed by asbestos while she trained as a GP at an NHS hospital in Birmingham. Perhaps she’d still be alive and with us today.

However, the sad truth is that she was let down by a broken system, underpinned by asbestos safety regulations which remain unfit for purpose.

Richard Blunt: "Horror stories continue to emerge every year about the presence of asbestos across this country, including in 2025."

A system that continues to threaten thousands of lives across the UK each year – including dedicated public servants such as NHS staff, teachers, police officers, armed forces personnel and even the lives of our politicians in the heart of Westminster.

In my mother’s case, she recalled extensive building works being carried out around the hospital where she was working as a junior doctor between 1984 and 1988. During these works the staff weren’t given information about the presence of asbestos and the risks of exposure. They weren’t protected from the danger.

Over three decades later she was diagnosed with mesothelioma, just a month after celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary. Having spent a career caring for the community around her, she was let down by that very same system which failed to care for her. She sadly passed away just a few months after her diagnosis.

I’m sure many would like to tell you, ‘well, that was the 1980s’, before asbestos was even banned across the UK in 1999. Things are much better now…

Unfortunately, those people would be terrifyingly wrong.

The UK’s modern asbestos crisis

Horror stories continue to emerge every year about the presence of asbestos across this country, including in 2025.

Stories such as Holy Family Catholic Primary School in Bristol, where renovations led to asbestos fibres spreading through the school hall for two days while in use by pupils and staff. (As a reminder, asbestos remains present in over 80 per cent of schools, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) finding in 2023 that one-third of schools were in breach of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 – seven per cent breaching regulations with enough severity to warrant an enforcement notice. If HSE’s survey results were extrapolated across all schools in England, that would represent over 1,000 schools severely in breach of safety regulations, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of pupils and staff.)

Photograph: iStock

Stories that highlight asbestos killed nine times as many service personnel and veterans than the Taliban ever did during the Afghan campaign. Or that 82 per cent of police stations in Scotland still contain asbestos, despite evidence presented by the Scottish Police Federation on the dangers of this in 2019.

Or that authorities have found over one thousand items of asbestos materials in the Houses of Parliament during the past decade – multiple exposure incidents happening to threaten the lives of staff.

Stories such as council tenants in central London resorting to covering their collapsed ceiling in bin bags for two years after the council failed to inspect potential asbestos. Or the recent story of residents concerned asbestos is being spread throughout their community in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire – amosite found in a sample of dust taken from a resident’s inside windowsill. Following developments of this, it was good to read that Kirklees Council conducted independent testing which found no asbestos fibres in the air around the site. That leaves two stark questions to answer. Where did the asbestos in residents’ homes come from? And why was the site’s history as an asbestos factory only uncovered through a search of historical records, rather than being known from the start of the planning process?

These are just some of the many failings we know about, underlining the threat which asbestos continues to pose across UK society today – remaining the UK’s no.1 workplace killer, causing thousands of deaths every year.

The asbestos information gap

Despite the ongoing risks which the public face from asbestos, there is still little information readily available to the public on the dangers that it presents. While the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 mandates that all duty holders for non-domestic premises are responsible for writing an asbestos management plan – these plans are well known to be of varying quality and accessibility. There remain no standards set for how they should be completed, with no mandatory accreditation standards for asbestos surveyors. This remains unacceptable.

While it is technically possible to submit a Freedom of Information request to see the asbestos management plans created by duty holders of public estate buildings, such as schools or hospitals, in practice this is laborious and slow.

Compare this to the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) register, which enables any member of the public to instantly look up the rating for any building across the UK, including residential and commercial, through a Gov.uk national database.

You can look up how environmentally friendly your kids’ school is, but not easily find out if it has dangerous levels of asbestos. The public has a right to know this information, to understand the dangers of asbestos in the buildings where they work, where they send their children to school or where they need to access as part of daily life.

The consequences of this inability to access critical information are clear, with research published by High Speed Training in November 2024 finding that 69 per cent of people reported they have never been concerned about asbestos at work, 31 per cent unaware that asbestos can affect the general public. This is not a matter of ignorance – it is a direct result of a system that withholds critical information.

Raising the public’s knowledge of asbestos

Campaigners have long known a key part of the solution to repairing the UK’s broken system is the creation of a national asbestos register, similar to the EPC register already available.

Not only will it enable the Government to gather better information and tackle the UK’s asbestos crisis with a data-led strategy and approach – prioritising repairs on the highest-risk buildings – but it will also better inform the public through instant access to data about which buildings pose the greatest asbestos risks.

A register could even be used as a guide to ensure those public servants working in buildings where increased asbestos risks are present receive additional asbestos safety training – making them fully aware of the dangers to ensure mistakes are not made.

This also needs to be built on a much wider and much more rigorous approach to asbestos safety training across the UK in general.

Again, while the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 and Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 mandate that employers provide asbestos awareness training to employees who may encounter asbestos during their work, this is also widely known to be piecemeal in practice.

Asbestos training should not be considered as a tick-box exercise, it must be comprehensive, practical and tailored to real-world risks. Every worker deserves training that empowers them to recognise danger and take informed action to protect themselves and others. Only through this meaningful education can we genuinely reduce harm.

I know my mother’s story is not an isolated tragedy and that her experience and the experience of countless others underlines the devastating consequences of this systemic failure and lack of awareness, training and transparency around asbestos exposure.

We have the knowledge and the solutions to fix this problem. We only need the will to act and ensure that no more families in the future are left to wonder ‘If only we had known’.

Richard Blunt is an ambassador for Mesothelioma UK, a national charity dedicated to supporting people affected by mesothelioma through expert care, information and advocacy. For more information see:
mesothelioma.uk.com
@Mesouk
linkedin.com/company/mesothelioma-uk